A Queer Ukrainian Wartime Drama

A Ukrainian queer couple face challenges unimaginable for most Western LGBTQI+ folk in I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming, a nuanced, finely lined drama that premiered in Locarno’s main competition. Produced by Tom Tykwer and Uwe Schott, this represents a second feature collaboration, after Grand Jeté, for married couple Anna Melikova, a Ukrainian writer, and German director Isabelle Stever, who were inspired by friends’ experiences back in Ukraine after the Russian invasion of 2022.

Dreaming explores what happens when 21st-century gender fluidity collides with the more rigid identity categories enforced by the state in a time of war. The core dramatic dilemma is thrust on fully transitioned trans man Oleh (Markus Bright), who suddenly faces military conscription along with the majority of Ukraine’s cis male population. Or, to paraphrase two cis female soldiers who turn Oleh back at the border, if he wants to be a man then he’ll have to fight for his country.

This horrifies his wife Olya (Tania Myronyshena), who wants them to emigrate to the safety of the EU as soon as possible, even if that means Oleh transitioning back to a female presentation. The film succeeds not only as an examination of the extraordinary quandary facing the couple but also simply as a compelling wartime drama featuring excellent performances from the two leads, who are, like most of the cast, non-professional actors. The film will cross continents next for the 64th edition of the New York Film Festival.

Smartly, Melikova’s script and Stever’s direction don’t obviously take either side, a neutrality that’s embedded even in the way Stever sets up the film’s opening scene, a flash-forward to a massive argument between the couple, observed as if by a neighbor through a window. Oleh has just received a conscription notice and seems inclined to report for service; Olya lets rip with what sounds like years of frustration, pointing out that she also didn’t sign up to be in a heterosexual relationship in the first place (evidently, the two were a lesbian couple before Oleh transitioned), and once again Oleh has made a decision without consulting her.

With the stakes thus established, the action rolls back to a happier time. On New Year’s Eve, 2021, Olya and Oleh are partying with other queer friends in a club, seemingly without a care in the world. During a phone call to Olya’s parents, she reveals that she’s getting married to a guy, an indirect way of proposing to her lover, who joyfully accepts.

A subsequent sex scene, discreetly shot but still pretty steamy, establishes the intense physical bond between the couple but also gives the film a chance to show that while Oleh has had top surgery, he’s not had visible bottom surgery like phalloplasty and metoidioplasty. Indeed, later in the film when the couple try to cross the border, Oleh reaches as if to unbutton his trousers in order to show the aforementioned female soldiers that he’s biologically female. They don’t care. What gender he has on his passport is the only thing that matters to the Ukrainian state.

In fact, thanks to regular testosterone injections, his natural height and the way his body has reacted to the “t”, he presents quite convincingly as male, with a hairy chest and a deep voice. In fact, as the film goes on, it’s implied that Olya’s parents — or at least her conventional Russophone mother Maryna (Iryna Mak) — think Oleh is a cis man, albeit one with some “effeminate” habits like not eating meat. (Maryna thinks vegetarianism is fine for women but men are healthier on a carnivore diet.)

Ultimately, however, the lifestyle differences between queer people like Olya and Oleh and straights like their extended family and neighbors end up mattering less than their shared identity as Ukrainians. As the movie goes on, and the invasion which was expected to be over after a few days drags into months and years, the horror of war solidifies the couple’s commitment both to each other and the country. They take in a young woman, a neighbor of Olya’s parents, who was brutalized in an unspecified way in her hometown of Bucha while they were away staying on the other side of the country, alluding to an actual atrocity in that municipality.

Snatches of real newscasts and YouTube videos provide a steady update on where the conflict has gotten as time passes, and even reveal that the options may not be so black and white for Oleh. It turns out there is a squadron in the army specifically for queer Ukrainians, for example, showing that being trans in the armed forces might not be as frightening as the couple first assumed.

And there sure isn’t an equivalent unit in the Russian Army under that country’s hideously homophobic regime, while the American armed forces are currently being forced by the Trump administration to push out trans and queer people from the enlisted population, while also cutting back on people of color and women in the higher ranks. If nothing else, this film could help bolster financial and military support for Ukraine in the EU and North America at a time when they’re badly in need of fresh funds and arms.